


and my heart was colder when you’d gone

by maplemood



Category: Penny Dreadful (TV)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Dysfunctional Family, Father-Daughter Relationship, Gen, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-19
Updated: 2019-01-19
Packaged: 2019-09-25 06:37:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,843
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17116307
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maplemood/pseuds/maplemood
Summary: It is possible they hate each other a fraction less than they once did. Possible, if not probable.(Or, four times Malcolm hurt Vanessa, one time she hurt him, and the one time they began to heal together.)





	and my heart was colder when you’d gone

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Taste_of_Suburbia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Taste_of_Suburbia/gifts).



> Happy holidays! _Penny Dreadful_ was one of my favorite discoveries of 2018, so when I saw you'd requested it (and Malcolm & Vanessa, no less!) I just had to write something for you. I hope you enjoy. :)

**_1._ **

Vanessa is six years old, sand gritting between her toes and in the folds of her rucked-up skirt. She is perched on the stone wall encircling the Murrays’ rockery, itself perched on a steep green slope overlooking the sea, and Sir Malcolm Murray, hero of countless fireside stories (so many of which she was not supposed to have overheard), is crouched down in front of her, dabbing Vanessa’s scraped knee with his handkerchief.

She flinches.

Sir Malcolm looks up. “Come now,” he says, his twinkling eyes warmer by far than the wind. “You’ll have to be braver than that, Miss Ives.”

“Father.” Mina’s voice is a spun-glass reproach. She squeezes Vanessa’s hand.

Vanessa squeezes back. “It hurts.”

“So it does.” Though he can’t feel the sand-rasp sting, the stickiness of blood in his torn stockings. “But see—there isn’t so very much blood after all. Not enough to scare a big girl like you, surely?”

Vanessa’s eyes prickle. She blinks at the top of Sir Malcolm’s head without answering.  

 

**_2._ **

She’s ten years old when she sees him next, and ten, Vanessa thinks, is practically a woman already. At the very least a young lady, and this time she won’t lose her nerve or her voice; she won’t cry. Vanessa will know exactly what to say. After all, it isn’t as if she hasn’t practiced.

But Sir Malcolm isn’t the sort of man one can practice for. He embraces her and Mina both, squeezes them to a crush of squeals and skirts in his arms, and Vanessa stumbles, jostles too hard against his injured side. He sucks in a sharp breath, she blurts, “Oh! Oh, I hurt you—” and her dreams of being a charming young lady who knows exactly what to say flutter out of reach.

“A cannibal’s knife,” he tells them later, when Mina and Peter and Vanessa are all crammed into his study, watching him trace his route across one of the many maps. “Sliced me right down to the ribs, but it’s almost healed now.”

“Almost?” Vanessa glances at his side. Shadows gathered in the folds of Sir Malcolm’s waistcoat are all too easy to mistake for blood, welling up dark and rich. “But it still hurts,” she says. “Don’t you need some—” she avoids Mina’s and Peter’s curious eyes. “Some medicine? Some tea?”

His eyes are as warm as she remembers, warm enough to bring a blush prickling to Vanessa’s cheeks. “Tea?” Sir Malcolm repeats. He laughs. “You delightful thing.”

The blush scorching down her neck, Vanessa laughs along with them. One day, she promises herself. One day she’ll know exactly what to say.

 

_**3.** _

At eleven, she doesn’t cry half as easily as she did at six, or even at ten. At eleven, Vanessa dashes headlong into breaking waves, urging Mina to follow as the hem of her skirt soaks heavy and crusts with sand. At eleven, Vanessa is brave, and Sir Malcolm is an old hero growing dusty at the back of her mind.

At twelve, she watches him fuck her mother. Though the betrayal of that doesn’t start to throb until many years later, Vanessa knows from then on that Malcolm is no hero—only a man, and a sinful one at that. But she loves him still. How could she bear to do otherwise, when Mina and Peter adore him, as ever, when at every homecoming he opens his arms to her as well as to them?

At eighteen, Vanessa lifts her skirts and spreads her legs and fucks his future son-in-law as hard as Malcolm ever fucked her mother. Her own kind of betrayal, one that comes too late to settle any scores.

 

_**4.** _

The year Vanessa turns nineteen, she spends a great many hours in a padded room, drenched, naked but for a thin white gown. Alone.

She knows he doesn’t really visit her, or if he does it isn't really him. The real Malcolm Murray would happily leave her to rot. This Malcolm, stiff-backed and stone-faced though he is, sits beside her cot. His eyes are dark and depthless, empty of fury and disgust, empty of everything else. He sits. He watches. Occasionally his face, leathery and browned by the sun, splits into a ravenous grin, and his depthless eyes spark blood-red.

He sits. He watches. He doesn’t touch her, never so much as a finger to the damp strands of hair straggling about her face. But oh, how she wishes he would. She is so cold. She is wet to the bone. She is wicked, she is weak; she cannot bear this punishment, however much she deserves it. Vanessa would rather run to the gate a hundred times, the smell of her betrayal growing stale between her legs. She would rather face up to him, to the hatred in his eyes hard enough to stop her heart; she would rather have Malcolm, the real Malcolm, sitting here beside her. She needs his voice. She needs him to call her a cruel little girl again, she needs his hands squeezing her arms, her throat. For then at least she might be warm, warm when the night is dark and full of horrors, and _Oh, Father, I am so cold. Father, I fear I will never be warm again, never again. Hold me, Father— Father—_

He sits. He watches. She is never warm.

 

_**5.** _

Well into her twenties now, Vanessa has learned how to move in polite society again. She has learned how to move around _him,_ how to keep their edges from cutting at one another any more than is absolutely necessary. Still.

Malcolm hates her, as she hates him. They both simmer in their failure to protect Mina, in their lusts, in their rage. Still. It is possible they hate each other a fraction less than they once did. Possible, if not probable.

“—he’s your father, then?” asks a young lady lingering on the edge of the ballroom. She excused herself from a bouncing, breathless dance along with Vanessa, though really she has eyes only for Malcolm, ensconced in the corner with a well-known hematologist and steadfastly ignoring them both.

Vanessa brushes a sweat-damp curl of hair behind her ear. “Of a kind,” she says. It seems the easiest answer.

“You’re his ward?” The other woman is red-lipped, red-haired. Slim and polished like a rib of an ivory fan—the sort, Vanessa thinks, who would enjoy him as much as he would enjoy her. “He must be a generous man.”

“He’s a wealthy man.” She squelches, as much as she can, the spark of disdain igniting in her belly. “He has a large house,” Vanessa says, “with plenty of room for both of us.”

She isn’t sure what possesses her to do what she does next. Jealousy, perhaps. Or perhaps she’s determined to see the same disdain flit across his face, determined to prove, again and again, that Malcolm is as hateful as she. In any case, Vanessa makes her way over to him, taps his shoulder with her ungloved hand.

“Sir Malcolm,” she says when he turns, her smile dark and soft. Close-lipped, hiding her teeth. “May I have the next dance?”

He looks her over a long moment, Vanessa in the creamy maroon gown he proclaimed a picture print before they left. “You ought to wear color more often,” he’d said, even gracing her with a rare smile. “It suits you.” And indeed, the moment stretches out so long that Vanessa—well, she doesn’t hope, only—

Malcolm turns on his heel, returning to his conversation as if she’d never interrupted it. His turns his back on her without a word, and Vanessa tells herself it’s for the best. He is, after all, not her father, and her hatred hasn’t cooled as much as that.

 

_**6.** _

“She wouldn’t want us to weep, I think.”

“Because you cannot weep?”

The question, honed to a glistening point, finds its mark; she watches Malcolm’s jaw clench, a muscle in his temple twitch. “Vanessa,” he says, “you know full well I cannot weep any more than you can.”

And so she turns her eyes back to the grave. The pile of half-frozen earth, raw as an oozing scab, does not look large enough to fit anything beneath it, let alone a full-grown woman. Let alone Mina, and all the contradictions Mina held inside herself. All her love and spite and bloodlust frozen, immobile beneath the earth. Vanessa’s fists clench the heavy folds of her skirts.

It is bitterly cold.

His breath puffing out in milky clouds beside her, Malcolm says, “I know you do not credit me with it, but I always—I believed I loved her as much as I was able.”

And there, he would be wrong. Vanessa watches the haze of her own breath, dry-eyed. “I never thought you didn’t love her. I only knew your love wasn’t enough.” She blinks. She unclenches her fists.“No more than mine was.”

It’s a poor apology, if it is an apology at all. Yet Malcolm, in one of the first acts of true generosity Vanessa has ever witnessed from him, accepts it without a word. They stand, side by side, as the snow drifts down around them, and when stray flakes become whorls, stinging in the icy wind, they turn to go home.  

It isn’t until an hour later, when they’re both huddled at the fireside, mugs of piping hot tea clamped between their hands, that he asks, “Do you remember—you would have been only nine or ten—you offered me tea once, for a cut I had on my ribs?”

“Vaguely.” Vanessa raises her eyebrows with a small smile. All she really remembers is the shame of it; she’d so longed for him to think her grown up.

Malcolm shakes his head. “I thought it the sweetest thing anyone had done for me that day,” he says, gazing not at her but into the fireplace. “I’d told you it had healed, but you worried because you saw that it still hurt.”

Their mugs steam, and the fire crackles, bits of warmth in the dark night. Vanessa tries to sip her tea, her throat all but closed. She sets the mug down.

“Hurt always lingers on. Healing is rarely pretty, Vanessa.”

It’s her turn to watch the fire, unable to meet his eyes. She remembers the terror of the final confrontation, not a week past, the crack of Malcolm’s gun and the spill of Mina’s blood across the deserted stage. She remembers long-ago afternoons spent poring over maps in his leather-brown study, a seaside expedition that ended with Malcolm cleaning gritty sand from her scraped knee. “You were kind to me then,” Vanessa says finally. “To us all, and we loved you for it. Dearly.” _Father,_ a voice pipes in her head, glass-spun. _Hold me, Father, I’m so cold._ Broken things, Vanessa thinks, rarely heal whole. 

Snow hisses, frets against the window panes.

His hand is waiting when she reaches for it. Open and warm, and it closes over hers.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Title swiped from "Whispers in the Dark" by Mumford & Sons


End file.
